ROB LYONS

According to the latest figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the ongoing outbreak of ebola in West Africa has now sickened nearly 28,000 people and killed 11,279. This is an astonishing death toll from a terrifying disease which, until recently, had only surfaced sporadically, with far fewer deaths. While the number of reported cases has dropped sharply – with just 62 in the past three weeks across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – the potential for future epidemics remains.

Oh Tesco, what have you done? This week, the supermarket giant announced that some sugary drinks will be removed from its shelves. One is Capri-Sun. Not a murmur from anyone about its demise. But another is Ribena, a drink – or, at least, a name – that has a long history and still inspires much affection among Brits.

On Tuesday, the Health and Wellbeing Board of Brighton and Hove Council will consider starting a consultation on whether to ban smoking in the city’s outdoor spaces like parks and beaches. Such a proposal should be welcomed - because it starkly reveals the ludicrous basis of bans on smoking more generally.

A hoax paper claiming dark chocolate can help you lose weight makes a valuable point about the state of science publishing today. But the real problem comes when such papers chime with political agendas.

News stories about the latest AMAZING diet secret are commonplace - and a standing joke. The media has a steady stream of reports that adding this or avoiding that will soon translate into disappearing inches from our waistlines. Most of this stuff is quickly forgotten. Today’s astonishing research finding is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper.

So it was no wonder that a team in Germany, working with documentary makers producing a film about the junk science of the diet industry, was able to catapult a story about a wonder food into the mainstream media. The scam closely modeled common practices in the field: the team picked a likely candidate for a wonder food, dark chocolate; they conducted an actual clinical trial that was far too small and poorly controlled to give meaningful results; and tortured the resulting data until a statistically significant result popped up. With an (almost) straight face, they were able to claim that people who ate a low-carb diet but also ate a small bar of dark chocolate each day lost more weight than those who ate a low-carb diet alone.

Lowering the legal limit won’t just punish drivers and it won’t make the roads much safer.

The Police Federation for England and Wales, which represents rank-and-file police officers, has called for the legal limit for drink driving to be reduced. But there would be very little benefit from such a reduction - and it could do a lot of harm.

About me

I'm a writer and author on a wide range of issues. I'm the former deputy editor of the online magazine spiked and I currently work at the Institute of Ideas. I'm the author of Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder (Imprint Academic, 2011).